SQLskills community mentoring – round 2

Back in November last year I blogged about Jonathan's idea to mentor someone who's attended one of our classes and how Jonathan, Joe, and I each picked someone to mentor for six months. Our mentees (Steven Ormrod, Luke Jian, and Brad Hoff, respectively) have all said how much they've benefited from the arrangement and we've really enjoyed helping them out.

Now it's time to announce the next three people who we'll be mentoring for the next six months, with brief bios I've put together based on their own words.

Joe is going to mentor Dan Taylor, who attended our IE1 and IE3 classes in Tampa earlier this year:

Daniel Taylor started his career over 17 years ago doing QA and mainframe PL-I programming, eventually landing a Junior DBA position at Nielsen Media Research Company working with Sybase ASE 11 thru 12.5 and Sybase IQ, eventually moving to SQL server. He is currently the SQL DBA Team Lead and a Database Staff Specialist at Publix Supermarkets and he's worked with SQL Server versions from 7.0 to 2008 R2.

Daniel has B.S. degrees in Psychology and Economics. In a past incarnation, he was even a Flight Attendant for T.W.A. ([Paul] which I heard was to settle a bet…)

When not at work Daniel likes to spend time with his friends and family. Daniel, Missy (Daniel's wife of almost 17 years), and their son Parker (5-1/2 year old) enjoy taking trips to the Smokies of North Carolina where they lose themselves "in the hills."  One of Daniel's favorite quotes is "The Mountains are Calling and I must go" – John Muir.

He's on Twitter as @DBABullDog.

Jonathan is going to mentor Kenneth Urena, who attended our IE1, IE2, and IE3 classes in Tampa earlier this year:

Kenneth is from the "Los Santos" (The Saints) area of Costa Rica, where they produce the best coffee in the world ([Paul] It is really, really good…) 

Kenneth started out as an 'accidental DBA' back in 1999 on SQL Server 7.0. Since then he has grown to become the Database Architect of a multi-national company. He's responsible for managing a DBA team who is responsible for the entire development cycle from design through production support of multiple applications on around 100 SQL Server instances from SQL Server 2005 through 2008 R2.

Kenneth holds multiple MCTS and MCITP certifications on SQL Server 2008 and is working towards his MCM certification.

He's on Twitter (very recently) as @sqlcr.

I'm going to mentor Orson Weston, who we've known for years starting at SQL Connections in 2007 and who has attended 3 of our classes, most recently IEBI in Chicago last month:

Orson was born and raised in southern California and currently works in San Diego for Continental Data Graphics, a Boeing Company, as a Corporate Service DBA. He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems and has been working with SQL Server since 2001.

When Orson is not working with SQL Server, he enjoys traveling, sports, and spending time with family and friends, including his brand new addition – an amazing newborn!

He's on Twitter as @oweston12.

I'd like to congratulate these three guys and look forward to us helping them out over the next six months!

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